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By Kim MurphyLOS ANGELES TIMES • Tuesday November 6, 2012 2:00 PM

JOINT BASE LEWIS-McCHORD, Wash. — A U.S. Army sergeant accused of killing 16 Afghan civilians in
a middle-of-the-night rampage returned to his bunk halfway through the killing spree and told a
friend: “Hey, Mac, I just shot some people in Alkozai,” an Army prosecutor said yesterday at the
opening of Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ preliminary hearing on murder charges.

When that fellow sergeant appeared not to believe him, telling him to “quit messing around”
because he needed to go back to sleep, Bales said: “Cool, I’m going to Najiban, I’ll be back at 5.”
At that point, the 39-year-old sergeant left the base again and allegedly shot 11 people in that
second village, south of the Army outpost near Kandahar.

A general alarm was raised after an Afghan guard spotted Bales leaving the base the second time.
By the time Bales returned — covered in blood and wearing an Afghan shawl around his shoulders — he
seemed surprised to be greeted with leveled guns and demands that he drop his own weapon,
prosecutor Lt. Col. Joseph Morse told a hearing officer at the Article 32 proceeding, the military
equivalent of a preliminary hearing.

“Are you (expletive) kidding me? Mac, did you rat me out?” Bales allegedly said as he was
ordered to drop his weapons, which included an M-4 rifle, a pistol and a grenade launcher.

“He makes multiple admissions that not only did he commit these crimes, (but) he was lucid, he
was coherent, he was responsive,” Morse said.

Military prosecutors said they would seek the death penalty for Bales.

The shootings of mostly women and children in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province in March marked
the worst case of civilian slaughter blamed on an individual U.S. soldier since the Vietnam War and
eroded already-strained U.S.-Afghan ties after more than a decade of conflict in the country.

The prosecutor’s statement provides the first detailed account of the morning of March 11, when
Bales is accused of engaging in an attack in both Alkozai, just north of the special-forces base at
Camp Belambay, and Najiban, to the south.

Just before leaving the base at midnight, Morse said, Bales appeared at the room of one of the
special-forces team members deployed at the camp. Bales, a father of two, talked about domestic
problems at home and expressed frustration with the rules of engagement that he believed led to
injuries of U.S. forces suffered from a homemade bomb in the days before the shootings, Morse
said.